


Don't Trust, Just Jump

by avislightwing



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Drowning, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Loss of Faith, Near Death Experiences, POV Second Person, Post-Episode: s02e35, Trauma, or that isn't unbearably angsty?, the answer is no apparently, will I ever write something that isn't one of taliesin's characters?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-25
Updated: 2018-10-25
Packaged: 2019-08-07 07:56:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16404392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/avislightwing/pseuds/avislightwing
Summary: Almost drowning does a number on a person. Caduceus reflects on where he is, and how he got there, and where to go from here.





	Don't Trust, Just Jump

You’ve never been afraid of death.

Death has always been a friend. A helpmate, a soft, gentle hand reaching out to you and connecting this world and the next. A servant of the Wildmother that threads relics of life through something lifeless and embeds the memory of their existence indelibly into the earth, which forgets nothing.

You grew up surrounded by crumbling stone and trailing vines, snow littering the ground like ash and making everything quiet and peaceful. You grew up with the love of a family and a sense of home. None of you feared death. What was there to fear? She sheltered you, provided the delicate blossoms you made into tea, kept you close and watched over you.

You realize now you never really knew her.

You feel cold, the kind of cold that goes bone-deep and only comes in the bitterest winter storms, when you would curl up with your siblings and wish your fur was thicker. The warmth of Jester’s hug lingers like a ghost, but it wasn’t enough. She tried her best; you don’t blame her. You appreciate her kindness.

The water wasn’t kind.

You shudder as you recall the feeling of drowning, the clinging-cold feeling of being immersed, the choked-desperate feeling when your body tried to pull air into your lungs and only found water.

You couldn’t feel the Wildmother.

You close your eyes, let your forehead fall forward against your folded-up knees. In those moments when you could feel the life draining from your body, when you felt as helpless and cold as any corpse you cast Decompose on with a gentle hand, you could not feel your goddess’s presence.

Jester, dear heart, did help with that. She is one who has loved and been abandoned and hauled up again, out of the dark-swimming waters of terror like how Yasha pulled you back into the ship. She was kind, comforting, but in her eyes you read the deep, helpless pain of having to constantly trust and knowing that sometimes you reach for a hand that isn’t there.

Sometimes you have to cast a spell on yourself and get back into the water, even knowing that it might kill you. Knowing that something might drag you down and fill your lungs with darkness and your heart with despair. Knowing that you might die here, in the blackened water, food for the fish instead of the fungus and four-footed animals of your home.

Home is so far away.

If you were a sailor, you would have any number of words to explain how you were feeling. You could say that you felt unmoored, or like your anchor had been cut loose. You could say you were drifting, directionless. You could say you felt lost at sea. But you have none of this language, for the very reason that this is all strange and foreign and so far from what you know. Your graveyard stayed in a single spot. It breathed and changed with the seasons, but always remained what it was. Even when it was dying, it was no less your home. It is no less your home now, so many miles away from it.

The sea is different. The surface is sometimes tossed and sometimes glassy-still, the sky sometimes a blue that hurts your eyes and sometimes grey with clouds that bring not shivering snow but pelting rain. And below the surface is a whole other world, one unfamiliar as the sea’s existence at all. Below are powers beyond you – maybe even beyond the Wildmother. You’ve seen Fjord’s expression when he looks out at the sea, yellow eyes slit-pupiled and keen, something Other stirring behind them.

Then there are those that do not die, and that frightens you more than anything. Fjord, with his clever eyes and charming smile, brought one back and dismissed it as if it were nothing, as if it were not an abomination. As if he had not breathed a facsimile of life back into that which should belong to the Wildmother, to the cycle of life and death.

What do you do when you’re overwhelmed by _new_  and _strange_   and _frightening_?

What do you do when the water closes over your head and fills your lungs, and you reach out for a hand that isn’t there?

You’re used to trusting. That’s all you’ve ever done. But sometimes you can’t trust. Sometimes there’s no trusting to be done. Sometimes your goddess abandons you, and those around you are as lost as you are.

Sometimes you have to let yourself drown.

Sometimes you don’t trust. You cast a spell, hold your breath. You just jump.

And pray there’s something at the bottom besides a death whose face you don’t recognize.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on tumblr [@ birdiethebibliophile](birdiethebibliophile.tumblr.com)!


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